Photographer Alberto Guglielmi splits his time between his home and studio in the Ulster County hamlet of Accord, the island of Sardinia, and his native Rome. A professional windsurfer and snowboarder prior to taking a degree in economics, Guglielmi worked as a management consultant and rose to vice president of a Manhattan-based design firm. After seven years in the corporate world, Guglielmi decided he was “finally ready to leave the tie in the closet and go back to my roots.” Passionate about photography since childhood, Guglielmi found the transition to professional photography an easy transition. Guglielmi now travels the world on assignment.
Specializing in lifestyle and portraits, Guglielmi is also known for his extreme sports photography. He has shot covers for publications such as Surf, Windsurf, Surfers, and Wind. In 2006 one of his extreme-sport photos was chosen in the top 50 in a “Best of 2006” worldwide contest. The photo is currently traveling the world as part of an exhibition sponsored by Red Bull.
This month’s cover image, The Human, is an underwater portrait of Italian surfer Nicolo Violati diving through a wave in the Maldives, an island chain off the coast of India, last fall. The photo is part of a recent series by the artist created around, inside, and over the element of water, trying to explore it from different angles and capturing the sculptural forms it takes when frozen in time.
Guglielmi’s work will be part of a three-person show, “Aqua & Terra,” with ceramicist Kaete Brittin-Shaw and nature photographer Hardie Truesdale. Brittin-Shaw and Truesdale have collaborated for the past several years on photo/ceramic mashups. Their process: Truesdale takes a few of Brittin-Shaw’s small-scale porcelain sculptures and integrates them into a landscape portrait. Truesdale then prints, on canvas, an enlargement of the section of the photograph focused on the sculpture. The detail on canvas is then exhibited with the actual sculpture and the original photo.
“Aqua Terra” will be exhibited at Pearl Arts Gallery, 3572 Main Street, Stone Ridge, May 19 through June 23. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, May 19.
Alberto Guglielmi Portfolio: www.pearlartsgallery.com; www.mazma.com.
—Brian K. Mahoney
